Month: December 2019

Enlarge / Vannevar Bush seated at his desk, circa 1940-1944. During President Franklin Roosevelt's administration, Bush built a national science policy based on a new structure for innovating quickly and effectively. (credit: Wikimedia Commons/Public domain)

Few people these days are familiar with the name Vannevar Bush, an engineer who played a significant role in fostering the developing of key technologies that helped the Allied Forces win World War II.  He also spearheaded a highly influential federal report, Science: The Endless Frontier. Presented to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1945, the report famously argued for federal  funding of basic research in science, calling it "the pacemaker of technological progress." It shaped national science policy in the US for decades, and helped usher in an unprecedented explosion of economy-boosting scientific and technological innovation. (On the downside, Bush took a very dim view of the humanities—including science history—and social sciences.)

Physicist Safi Bahcall first learned about Vannevar Bush when he joined the President's Council of Advisers on Science Technology in 2011, charged with producing a version of that 1945 report for the 21st century. The experience dovetailed nicely with his longstanding interest in the arc of human thought over the course of history, and his background as both a physicist and a biotech entrepreneur. (Bahcall comes by his physics bona fides naturally: his father is the late John Bahcall, best known for helping to solve the solar neutrino problem.)  The result: an intriguing new theory about fostering innovation, based on the physics of phase transitions, that led to his first popular science book: Loonshots: How To Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.

"I think business people are really tired of the thousands of more or less identical business books produced every year, saying more of less the same stuff," Bahcall told Ars about his fresh approach to the topic. "And most economists have never seen the inside of a real company, so their models have no connection to reality. I happen to be in the middle of a very weird Venn Diagram of someone with condensed matter physics experience, someone with business experience, someone who likes to tell stories, and likes to think about history."

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Brooks | Getty Images)

While science as a whole has produced remarkably reliable answers to a lot of questions, it does so despite the fact that any individual study may not be reliable. Issues like small errors on the part of researchers, unidentified problems with materials or equipment, or the tendency to publish positive answers can alter the results of a single paper. But collectively, through multiple studies, science as a whole inches towards an understanding of the underlying reality.

A meta-analysis is a way to formalize that process. It takes the results of multiple studies and combines them, increasing the statistical power of the analysis. This may cause exciting results seen in a few small studies to vanish into statistical noise, or it can tease out a weak effect that's completely lost in more limited studies.

But a meta-analysis only works its magic if the underlying data is solid. And a new study that looks at multiple meta-analyses (a meta-meta-analysis?) suggests that one of those factors—our tendency to publish results that support hypotheses—is making the underlying data less solid than we like.

Enlarge / Cutting edge at the time, we swear.

In 1993, id Software released the first-person shooter Doom, which quickly became a phenomenon. The game is now considered one of the most influential games of all time.

A decade after Doom’s release, in 2003, journalist David Kushner published a book about id Software called Masters of Doom, which has since become the canonical account of Doom’s creation. I read Masters of Doom a few years ago and don’t remember much of it now, but there was one story in the book about lead programmer John Carmack that has stuck with me. This is a loose gloss of the story (see below for the full details), but essentially, early in the development of Doom, Carmack realized that the 3D renderer he had written for the game slowed to a crawl when trying to render certain levels. This was unacceptable, because Doom was supposed to be action-packed and frenetic. So Carmack, realizing the problem with his renderer was fundamental enough that he would need to find a better rendering algorithm, starting reading research papers. He eventually implemented a technique called “binary space partitioning,” never before used in a video game, that dramatically sped up the Doom engine.

That story about Carmack applying cutting-edge academic research to video games has always impressed me. It is my explanation for why Carmack has become such a legendary figure. He deserves to be known as the archetypal genius video game programmer for all sorts of reasons, but this episode with the academic papers and the binary space partitioning is the justification I think of first.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Well folks, we made it to the end of the decade, apparently. Since we've only been covering all things automotive since 2014, we'll save you having to read a tortured "best car of the decade," particularly since there have been some pretty huge changes during that time. Like the fact that electric vehicles are now a viable product. I'll also spare you bold proclamations like "this was the year of the EV!!", although it was good to see more variety on sale in 2019 than the year before.

Over the past 12 months we've driven a whole lot of cars and SUVs, and some of them have been really rather good. Of course, we've also driven some vehicles that failed to impress us, so Eric Bangeman and I have each put together a list of the 10 best things we drove in 2019, and the five worst. Now, enough with the preamble; on with the show!

Jonathan Gitlin, automotive editor and lover of wagons

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  Nissan built a BEV with a big battery—the Leaf Plus. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

10. Nissan Leaf Plus

Years ago, a man had a dream about building half a million affordable electric cars a year. That man was Nissan's Carlos Ghosn, and the car was the original Nissan Leaf. Those heady sales predictions were a little ahead of the technology curve, but Nissan still sold a heck of a lot of Leafs even though everyone said the battery pack was too small. The Leaf Plus solves that problem with a 62kWh battery pack. It's a very competent battery EV, and the best car in Nissan's lineup.